Yield Curve

Why would the IMF use the phrase “a second Great Depression” in a report that they know the entire world will read? To be more precise, the IMF stated that “large challenges loom for the global economy to prevent a second Great Depression”. Are they saying that if we do not change our ways that we are going to be heading into a horrific economic depression? Because if that is what they are trying to communicate, they would be exactly correct. At this moment, global debt levels are higher than they have ever been before in all of human history, and in their report the IMF specifically identified “global debt levels” as one of the key problems that could lead to “another financial meltdown”…

The world economy is at risk of another financial meltdown, following the failure of governments and regulators to push through all the reforms needed to protect the system from reckless behaviour, the International Monetary Fund has warned.

With global debt levels well above those at the time of the last crash in 2008, the risk remains that unregulated parts of the financial system could trigger a global panic, the Washington-based lender of last resort said.

And the IMF report also seemed to indicate that global central banks were responsible for the situation in which we now find ourselves.

The IMF Global Financial Stability report read: “The extended period of ultralow interest rates in advanced economies has contributed to the build-up of financial vulnerabilities.

“The large accumulation of public debt and the erosion of fiscal buffers in many economies following the crisis point to the urgency of rebuilding those defences to prepare for the next downturn.”

This is extremely unusual language for a globalist institution such as the IMF to be using.

Are they trying to signal that a major global financial crisis is imminent?

Of course they would hardly be the first to sound the alarm. Prominent names throughout the financial world are making all sorts of ominous declarations these days, and more red flags continue to pop up with each passing day.

For example, according to one analysis the global yield curve has gone negative for the first time since the last financial crisis, and this has created “the perfect cocktail” for a “liquidity crunch”…

A stronger US dollar and the global cost of capital rising is the perfect cocktail, in our opinion, for a liquidity crunch.

Major liquidity crunches often occur when yield curves around the world flatten or invert. Currently, the global yield curve is inverted; this is an ominous sign for the global economy and financial markets, especially overvalued stocks markets like the US.

To me, that is one of the most alarming charts that we have seen in a very long time.

Everything in the global financial system revolves around the flow of debt. When money is cheap and flowing freely, economic growth tends to expand. But when a liquidity crunch happens, economic activity can start contracting very rapidly, and it looks like that is the type of scenario that is quickly starting to develop.

In fact, we are already witnessing a substantial liquidity crunch in emerging markets. Lenders are hesitant to lend while economic conditions in those countries are chaotic, and a rapidly rising dollar has made servicing existing dollar-denominated debts increasingly problematic.

As we witnessed in 2008, debt bubbles end when liquidity begins to tighten up. The only way that this current debt bubble can survive is if it continues to expand, and it can only expand for as long as lenders are willing to part with their money easily.

If interest rates continue to go higher, the U.S. economy and the global economy as a whole are going to be hit really hard.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 201 points as Nike and Home Depot lagged. The 30-stock index dropped 356 points at its lows of the day and posted its worst decline since Aug. 10.

The Dow hit a new all-time high earlier this week, but many believe that it was essentially an illusion.

Because right now there are three times as many stocks at 52-week lows than there are stocks at 52-week highs. Prior to this week, there was only one other day since 1965 when this happened…

There have been two days since 1965 have seen 3x as many NYSE stocks at year-lows than at year-highs while the Dow traded at an all-time high.

The only other time prior to October 3, 2018?

December 28, 1999. The Dow was just days prior to hitting 11,722 on January 10, 2000, which would mark its long-term top. It would bottom at 8,062 on September 21, 2001. A 32% decline. The Nasdaq lost over 60% of its value during that same period, and would decline 78% from its all-time high.

I know that I have used a lot of technical jargon in this article, but the bottom line is this…

Big trouble is coming.

At this point, even Dennis Gartman is saying that “one cannot but think that a global bear market of some very real consequence is developing.”

Sentiment on Wall Street has shifted at a rate that is absolutely breathtaking. The mindless optimism of recent years has been replaced with an ominous feeling that a major downturn is imminent.

And because markets tend to go down a lot faster than they go up, a lot of people could end up being wiped out financially before they even realize what just hit them.

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Seven times since the 1960s we have seen the yield curve invert, and in each of those seven instances an economic recession in the United States has followed. Will this time be any different? Today, the yield curve is the flattest that it has been in 11 years, and many analysts believe that we will see an inversion before the end of 2018. If an inversion does take place, experts will be all over the mainstream media warning about “an imminent recession”. Unfortunately, most Americans don’t understand these things, and when they hear terms like “yield curve” they tend to quickly tune out. So in this article we are doing to define what a yield curve is, why it is so important, and why another U.S. recession may be rapidly approaching.

Let’s start with a really basic definition of a yield curve. This one comes from Investopedia…

A yield curve is a line that plots the interest rates, at a set point in time, of bonds having equal credit quality but differing maturity dates. The most frequently reported yield curve compares the three-month, two-year, five-year and 30-year U.S. Treasury debt. This yield curve is used as a benchmark for other debt in the market, such as mortgage rates or bank lending rates, and it is also used to predict changes in economic output and growth.

But most of the time, the experts that are talking about “the yield curve” are talking about the difference between interest rates on two-year and ten-year U.S. Treasury bonds. The following comes from CNBC…

Start with a government issued two-year Treasury bond and a 10-year Treasury bond. They both pay interest. Typically, the 10-year pays a higher interest rate than the two-year to compensate buyers for the time difference. The difference between the interest rates in these two bonds is called the “spread”. If the spread is greater than zero, it means the two-year interest rate is lower than the 10-year, and that is normally the case.

A normal spread for these two bonds will take the appearance of a rising chart — an upward sloping yield curve. But when the spread goes negative, the yield curve “inverts” giving the appearance of a negative yield curve.

An “inverted yield curve” strikes fear among investors because it makes lending unprofitable.

Banks borrow at short-term rates, lend long term and profit from the difference. So the gap between long and short rates predicts future loan profitability. The bigger the gap, the more eager banks are to lend. The yield curve is a great predictive proxy for future lending.

Our economy is fueled by debt, and an inverted yield curve tends to greatly discourage lending. When banks cut back on lending, that has the effect of “choking off” the economy, and that usually leads to an economic contraction…

In this interest-rate environment, banks would lose money by making loans. Not necessarily on all loans, but it does make some loans unfeasible and some less profitable, forcing banks to cut back on making loans; thereby choking off the access to credit markets that businesses need to grow. When it becomes harder for businesses to borrow, many businesses cancel or delay projects and hiring. Weaker businesses go out of business because they lose access to credit, which in turn causes layoffs. When this happens, it takes about a year, on average, for the U.S. economy to slip into a recession.

The yield curve inverted prior to the recession of 2008, and lending started to get a lot tighter. The resulting recession was a surprise to many Americans, but it should not have been. It was simply the logical conclusion of basic economic forces at work.

In fact, an inverted yield curve has preceded every single recession since the 1960s, but Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell doesn’t seem concerned that it is about to happen again…

Asked whether “a dramatic change in the shape of the yield curve in any way influence the trajectory you guys are on with respect to normalizing interest rates and the balance sheet,” Powell stated “no,” adding that “what really matters is what the neutral rate of interest is.”

That’s the interest rate level that neither stimulates growth or slows it down — something that changes over time and which Fed officials try hard to gauge.

But it should be noted that there are some experts that insist that we are focusing on the wrong things. One of those experts is Ken Fisher…

Almost everyone everywhere misses that the total global yield curve matters much more than America’s. And it’s doing just fine, thank you. Today’s global financial system is super interconnected. Behemoth banks can borrow in low-rate countries such as Germany, transfer funds here, hedge for currency risk and lend to Jim’s Widgets in mere seconds.

The global yield curve combines every developed country’s curve, weighted by the size of each economy. You get Britain’s 0.88 percent 10-year/three-month spread, Canada’s 0.69 percent gap, Germany’s 0.92 percent, France’s 1.23 percent, Japan’s 0.18 percent and the rest. Mash them all together based on GDP weighting, and that gets you a 0.9 percent global spread that’s bouncing along, going nowhere fast. Current U.S. yield curve fears miss this.

In the end, Fisher may be right.

Without a doubt, the global financial system is more interconnected today than ever before, and we may find a way to muddle through even if the yield curve inverts in the United States.

But I wouldn’t count on it. An inverted yield curve has accurately predicted a recession every single time since the 1960s, and it is not likely to be wrong this time around either.

Whenever we see an inverted yield curve, a recession almost always follows, and that is why many analysts are deeply concerned that the yield curve is currently the flattest that it has been in about a decade. In other words, according to one of the most reliable indicators that we have, we are closer to another recession than we have been at any point since the last financial crisis. And when you combine this with all of the other indicators that are screaming that a new crisis is on the horizon, a very troubling picture emerges. Hopefully this will turn out to be a false alarm, but it is looking more and more like big economic trouble is coming in 2018.

The professionals on Wall Street take the yield curve very, very seriously, and the fact that it has gotten so flat has many of them extremely concerned. The following comes from Business Insider…

In the past, including before the Great Recession of 2007-2009, an inverted yield curve, where long-term interest rates fall below their short-term counterparts, has been a reliable predictor of recessions. The bond market is not there yet, but a sharp recent flattening of the yield curve has many in the markets watchful and concerned.

The US yield curve is now at its flattest in about 10 years — in other words, since around the time a major credit crunch of was gaining steam. The gap between two-year note yields and their 10-year counterparts has shrunk to just 0.63 percentage point, the narrowest since November 2007.

If the yield curve continues to get even flatter, it will spark widespread selling on Wall Street, and if it actually inverts that will set off total panic.

And with each passing day, even more of the “experts” are warning of imminent market trouble. For example, just consider what Art Cashin told CNBC the other day…

Investors may want to take cover soon.

Art Cashin, UBS’ director of floor operations at the New York Stock Exchange, says a “split personality” is manifesting itself in the stock market, and it could hit Wall Street where it hurts at any moment.

“We’ve been setting record new highs, and often the breadth has been negative. We’ve had more declines than advances,” Cashin said Thursday on CNBC’s “Futures Now.”

When the financial markets finally do crash, it won’t exactly be a surprise.

In fact, we are way, way overdue for financial disaster.

Since the last financial crisis, we have been on the greatest debt binge in human history. U.S. government debt has gone from $10 trillion to $20 trillion, corporate debt has doubled, and U.S. consumer debt has now risen to nearly $13 trillion.

Debt brings consumption from the future into the present, and so it increases short-term economic activity at the expense of long-term financial health.

But we simply cannot continue to grow debt much, much faster than the overall economy is growing. I have never talked to anyone that believes that our debt binge is sustainable, and I doubt that I ever will.

The only reason why we have even gotten this far is because interest rates have been pushed to historically low levels. If the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt even returned to the long-term average, we would be paying more than a trillion dollars a year in interest on the national debt and the game would be over. Unprecedented intervention by the Federal Reserve and other global central banks has pushed interest rates way below the real rate of inflation, and that has bought us extra time.

But now the Federal Reserve and other global central banks are reversing course in unison, and global financial markets are already starting to decline.

The only way we can keep putting off the next financial crisis is if we continue our unprecedented debt binge and if global central banks continue to artificially prop up the financial markets.

Of course more debt and more central bank manipulation would just make the eventual financial disaster even worse, but that is what we are faced with at this point.

Most people simply don’t understand the gravity of the situation. Nothing was ever fixed after the last financial crisis. Instead, we went on the greatest debt binge that humanity has ever seen, and central banks started creating trillions of dollars out of thin air and recklessly injected that hot money into the financial system.

So now we are in the terminal phase of the largest financial bubble in human history, and there is no easy way out.

We basically have two choices. We can have a horrific financial crisis now, or we can have one a little bit later.

Usually the choice is “later”, and that is why our leaders have been piling on the debt and global central banks have been recklessly creating money.

But it is inevitable that our bad choices will catch up with us eventually, and when that happens the pain that we are going to experience is going to be absolutely off the charts.

If something happens seven times in a row, do you think that there is a pretty good chance that it will happen the eighth time too? Immediately prior to the last seven recessions, we have seen an inverted yield curve, and it looks like it is about to happen again for the very first time since the last financial crisis. For those of you that are not familiar with this terminology, when we are talking about a yield curve we are typically talking about the spread between two-year and ten-year U.S. Treasury bond yields. Normally, long-term rates are higher than short-term rates, but when investors get spooked about the economy this can reverse. Just before every single recession since 1960 the yield curve has “inverted”, and now we are getting dangerously close to it happening again for the first time in a decade.

On Thursday, the spread between two-year and ten-year Treasuries dropped to just 79 basis points. According to Business Insider, this is almost the tightest that the yield curve has been since 2007…

The spread between the yields on two-year and 10-year Treasurys fell to 79 basis points, or 0.79%, after Wednesday’s disappointing consumer-price and retail-sales data. The spread is currently within a few hundredths of a percentage point of being the tightest it has been since 2007.

Perhaps more notably, it is on a path to “inverting” — meaning it would cost more to borrow for the short term than the long term — for the first time since the months leading up to the financial crisis.

So why is an inverted yield curve such a big event? Here is how CNBC recently explained it…

An inverted yield curve, which has correctly predicted the last seven recessions going back to the late 1960’s, occurs when short-term interest rates yield more than longer-term rates. Why is an inverted yield curve so crucial in determining the direction of markets and the economy? Because when bank assets (longer-duration loans) generate less income than bank liabilities (short-term deposits), the incentive to make new loans dries up along with the money supply. And when asset bubbles are starved of that monetary fuel they burst. The severity of the recession depends on the intensity of the asset bubbles in existence prior to the inversion.

What is truly alarming is that the Federal Reserve can see what is happening to the yield curve, and they can see all of the other indications that the economy is slowing down, but they decided to raise rates anyway.

Raising rates in a slowing economy is a recipe for disaster, but the Fed has gone beyond that and has declared that it intends to start unwinding the 4.5 trillion dollars of assets that have accumulated on the Fed’s balance sheet.

Janet Yellen is trying to tell us that this will be a smooth process, but many analysts are far from convinced. For instance, just consider what Peter Boockvar recently told CNBC…

“They desperately want this to be an easy, smooth, paint-drying type of process, but there’s no chance,” said Peter Boockvar, chief market analyst at The Lindsey Group. “The whole purpose of quantitative easing was to inflame the markets higher. Why shouldn’t the reverse happen when we do quantitative tightening?”

I hope that there are no political motivations behind the Fed’s moves. During the Obama era, interest rates were pushed all the way to the floor and the financial system was flooded with new money by the Fed. But now the Fed is completely reversing the process now that Donald Trump is in office.

When the inevitable stock market crash comes, Trump will get most of the blame, but it will actually be the Federal Reserve’s fault. If the Fed had not injected trillions of dollars into the system, stocks would not have ever gotten this high. And now that they are reversing the process that created the bubble, a whole lot of innocent people out there are going to get really hurt as stock prices come crashing down.

And if you thought that the last recession was bad for average American families, wait until you see what happens this time around. As Kevin Muir has noted, it is utter madness for the Fed to hit the breaks in a rapidly slowing economy…

There are a million other little signs the US economy is rolling over, but that’s not important. What is important is the realization that until financial conditions back up, the Fed will not ease off the brake.

To top it all off, the Fed is not only braking, but they are also preparing the market for a balance sheet unwind. This is like QE in reverse.

It’s a perfect storm of negativity. An overly tight Fed that is determined to withdraw monetary stimulus even in the face of a declining economy.

Even if the Fed ultimately decides not to unwind their balance sheet very rapidly, rising rates will still significantly slow down economic activity.

Rising mortgage rates are going to hit the housing market hard, rising rates on auto loans are horrible news for an auto industry that is already having a horrendous year, and rising rates on credit cards will mean higher credit card payments for millions of American families.

Today, an unelected, unaccountable central banking cartel has far more power over our economy than anyone else, and that includes President Trump and Congress. The more manipulating they do, the bigger our economic booms and busts become, and this next bust is going to be a doozy.

There have been 18 distinct recessions or depressions since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, and if we finally want to get off of this economic roller coaster for good we need to abolish the Federal Reserve.

As many of you may have heard, I am very strongly leaning toward running for Congress here in Idaho, and one of the key things that is going to set me apart from any other candidate is that I am very passionate about shutting down the Federal Reserve. I recently detailed why it is imperative that we do this in an article entitled “The Federal Reserve Must Go”. Central banks are designed to create government debt spirals, and the size of the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger since the Fed was initially established.

If we ever want to do something about our national debt, and if we ever want to get our economy back on track on a permanent basis, we have got to do something about the Federal Reserve.

What we are all watching unfold right now is a complete and total financial nightmare for Italy. Italian bond yields are soaring to incredibly dangerous levels, and now the yield curve for Italian bonds is turning upside down. So what does that mean? Normally, government debt securities that have a longer maturity pay a higher interest rate. There is typically more risk when you hold a bond for an extended period of time, so investors normally demand a higher return for holding debt over longer time periods. But when investors feel as though a major economic downturn or a substantial financial crisis is coming, the yield on short-term bonds will often rise above the yield for long-term bonds. This happened to Greece, to Ireland and to Portugal and all three of them ended up needing bailouts. Now it is happening to Italy and Spain may follow shortly, but the EU cannot afford to bail out either of them. An inverted yield curve is a major red flag. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be much hope that there is going to be a solution to this European debt crisis any time soon.

We are witnessing a crisis of confidence in the European financial system. All over Europe bond yields went soaring today. When I finished my article about the financial crisis in Italy on Tuesday night, the yield on 10 year Italian bonds was at 6.7 percent. I awoke today to learn that it had risen to 7.2 percent.

But even more importantly, the yield on 5 year Italian bonds is now sitting at about 7.5 percent, and the yield on 2 year Italian bonds is about 7.2 percent.

The yield curve for Italian bonds is in the process of turning upside down.

If you want to see a frightening chart, just look at this chart that shows what has happened to 2 year Italian bonds recently.

Do phrases like “heading straight up” and “going through the roof” come to mind?

This comes despite rampant Italian bond buying by the European Central Bank. CNBC is reporting that the European Central Bank was aggressively buying up 2 year Italian bonds and 10 year Italian bonds on Wednesday.

So what does it say when even open market manipulation by the European Central Bank is not working?

Of course some in the financial community are saying that the European Central Bank is not going far enough. Some prominent financial professionals are even calling on the European Central Bank to buy up a trillion euros worth of European bonds in order to soothe the markets.

Part of the reason why Italian bond yields rose so much on Wednesday was that London clearing house LCH Clearnet raised margin requirements on Italian government bonds.

But that doesn’t explain why bond yields all over Europe were soaring.

The reality is that bond yields for Spain, Belgium, Austria and France also skyrocketed on Wednesday.

This is a crisis that is rapidly engulfing all of Europe.

But at this point, bond yields in Europe are still way too low. European leaders shattered confidence when they announced that they were going to ask private Greek bondholders to take a 50% haircut. So now rational investors have got to be asking themselves why they would want to hold any sovereign European debt at all.

There is no way in the world that any rational investor should invest in European bonds at these levels.

Are you kidding me?

If there is a very good chance that private bondholders will be forced to take huge haircuts on these bonds at some point in the future then they should be demanding much, much higher returns than this.

But if bond yields continue to go up in Europe, we are going to quickly come to a moment of very great crisis.

The following is what Rod Smyth of Riverfront Investment Group recently told his clients about the situation that is unfolding in Italy….

“In our view, 7% is a ‘tipping point’ for any large debt-laden country and is the level at which Greece, Portugal and Ireland were forced to accept assistance”

Other analysts are speaking of a “point of no return”. For example, check out what a report that was just released by Barclays Capital had to say….

“At this point, Italy may be beyond the point of no return. While reform may be necessary, we doubt that Italian economic reforms alone will be sufficient to rehabilitate the Italian credit and eliminate the possibility of a debilitating confidence crisis that could overwhelm the positive effects of a reform agenda, however well conceived and implemented.”

But unlike Greece, Ireland and Portugal, the EU simply cannot afford to bail out Italy.

Italy’s national debt is approximately 2.7 times larger than the national debts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal put together.

Plus, as I noted earlier, Spain is heading down the exact same road as Italy.

Europe has simply piled up way, way too much debt and now they are going to pay the price.

Global financial markets are very nervous right now. You can almost smell the panic in the air. As a CNBC article posted on Wednesday noted, one prominent think tank actually believes that there is a 65 percent chance that we will see a “banking crisis” by the end of November….

“There is a 65 percent chance of a banking crisis between November 23-26 following a Greek default and a run on the Italian banking system, according to analysts at Exclusive Analysis, a research firm that focuses on global risks.”

Personally, I believe that particular think tank is being way too pessimistic, but this just shows how much fear is out there right now.

It seems more likely to me that the European debt crisis will really unravel once we get into 2012. And when it does, it just won’t be a few countries that feel the pain.

For example, when Italy goes down many of their neighbors will be in a massive amount of trouble as well. As you can see from this chart, France has massive exposure to Italian debt.

Just like we saw a few years ago, a financial crisis can be very much like a game of dominoes. Once the financial dominoes start tumbling, it will be hard to predict where the damage will end.

Some believe that what is coming is going to be even worse than the financial nightmare of a few years ago. For example, the following is what renowned investor Jim Rogers recently told CNBC….

“In 2002 it was bad, in 2008 it was worse and 2012 or 2013 is going to be worse still – be careful”

Rogers says that the reason the next crisis is going to be so bad is because debt levels are so much higher than they were back then….

“Last time, America quadrupled its debt. The system is much more extended now, and America cannot quadruple its debt again. Greece cannot double its debt again. The next time around is going to be much worse”

So what is the “endgame” for this crisis?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is saying that fundamental changes are needed….

“It is time for a breakthrough to a new Europe”

So what kind of a “breakthrough” is she talking about? Well, Merkel says that the ultimate solution to this crisis is going to require even tighter integration for Europe….

“That will mean more Europe, not less Europe”

As I have written about previously, the political and financial elite of Europe are not going to give up on the EU because of a few bumps in the road. In fact, at some point they are likely to propose a “United States of Europe” as the ultimate solution to this crisis.

But being more like the United States is not necessarily a solution to anything.

No, the real problem is government debt and the central banks of the western world which act as perpetual debt machines.

By not objecting to central banks and demanding change, those of us living in the western world have allowed ourselves to become enslaved to gigantic mountains of debt. Unless something dramatically changes, our children and our grandchildren will suffer under the weight of this debt for as long as they live.